In hopes of getting the final word on the recent election, I called my favorite inside source, Ananias Ziegler, a retired Army colonel who serves as media relations director for the Committee That Really Runs America.
“How are things out there in Azulorado?” he began.
“We’re not changing the state’s name from red to blue just because we elected a scary ‘Boulder liberal’ to the U.S. Senate,” I replied, “or because Marilyn Musgrave will quit protecting us from gay marriage. Besides, I was looking at the bigger picture.”
“OK, we can do that,” Ziegler said. “Did you like how we engineered the big drop in oil prices?”
“Of course,” I agreed. “Who likes paying $65 to fill up? I’ve owned cars that I paid less than that for. There was a ’53 Ford I bought off a dealer lot for $35 back in 1967.”
He interrupted. “Let’s stay on track. What happens when gas prices fall?”
“People drive more,” I said.
“And they quit worrying,” he responded. “So they’ll continue to support sprawl development and big-box stores that they have to drive to, rather than compact development and ma-and-pa stores in walking distance. Cheap gas is good news for real-estate developers.”
When he put it that way, it made sense. “Any other benefits?” I asked.
“Of course. A lot of your tree-hugger fantasies about solar, wind, mass transit, all that greenie stuff — they might sound almost realistic when gas is pushing $5 a gallon. But with $2 gas? Windmills and solar panels don’t pay when fossil-fuel energy is cheap. This whole alternative-energy boom will collapse faster than Lehman Brothers. Big Oil maintains its hold. And there’s another benefit.”
Naturally I asked him about it.
“We won’t need to bail out Detroit if Americans go back to buying big gas-guzzling SUVs,” Ziegler said. “That’s one thing that Detroit knows how to build and sell at a handsome profit. I’m busy working on a way to spin two-ton dualie pickups as the patriotic way to protect pensions for retired auto workers while preserving American jobs.”
“That’s clever,” I conceded. “Drop the price of oil, and we stay addicted. Any other benefits for the Committee?”
“According to our analysts,” he replied, “If crude drops much below $65 a barrel, then Alaska runs into serious financial problems because the state budget relies so heavily on oil royalties. That could really hurt Gov. Sarah Palin’s political prospects.”
This sounded like a clue. “You’re working to hurt her political prospects, so she can’t make a run for the Republican nomination in 2012?” I asked.
“I didn’t say that,” Ziegler harrumphed. “I was just trying to point out that the Law of Unintended Consequences hasn’t been repealed. Truth be told, we’re not sure yet where she fits into our plans, since she’s so ‘mavericky’ and all that.”
“But surely you have plans for her, given her popularity with the base,” I prodded.
He refused the bait. “We’ve got more pressing issues. This election wasn’t close, so we’ll have a hell of a time going after Obama’s legitimacy by blaming ACORN. We must come up with something, though, just to slow him down if we can. But it’s sure hard to sell the public on the virtues of small government and free enterprise when all those big companies have their hands out.”
“It does sound as though you’ve got your work cut out for you,” I consoled, noticing an apparent contradiction. “It looks as though you’re promoting socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.”
He closed on an upbeat note. “Hey, we’ve sold that before, and we can do it again.”
Ed Quillen (ed@cozine.com) is a freelance writer, history buff, publisher of Colorado Central Magazine in Salida and frequent contributor to The Post.
